Recent reporting from the past few months revealed gaps in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt's official schedule that left out significant periods of time particularly during his trips overseas, so where did the missing time go?
According to Pruitt's former deputy chief of staff, Pruitt and his staff intentionally removed items from his official schedule and added them to a secret schedule to hide them from the public and potentially Congress.
EPA staffers met routinely in Pruitt's office to "scrub," alter or remove from Pruitt's official calendar numerous records because they might "look bad," according to Kevin Chmielewski, Pruitt's former deputy chief of staff for operations, who attended the meetings. [...]
Chmielewski said that some interactions were intentionally removed from Pruitt's calendar after they occurred, such as meetings in June 2017 between Pruitt and Cardinal George Pell, who was charged weeks later with multiple historical charges of sexual offenses. Pell has pleaded not guilty.
The Federal Records Act requires every federal agency to preserve complete records of their activities. Federal agencies can redact records that are released to the public for specific reasons, but this report indicates that Pruitt altered or withheld records from the agency itself. Pruitt didn't exactly redact his records; he deleted them entirely in some cases.
Now, this is far from the only damning report on Pruitt's behavior that has emerged over the last 24 hours.
The Washington Post reports that former EPA staffers who spoke to the House Oversight Committee say Pruitt not only enlisted them to help his wife find a job, he also mandated that her job have a salary floor of at least $200,000.
That's amazing in how shameless it is, but that still doesn't capture just how much of a grifting cheapskate he is.
But this might: the Post reports that Pruitt had his aides make purchases on their credit cards, rather than his, and he never paid them back.
In one instance, according to former deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski, Hupp was stuck with a bill of roughly $600 for a booking she had made for the administrator’s family during the transition. Chmielewski said in an interview last month that he was in Jackson’s office when Hupp approached Pruitt’s chief of staff to explain that the period for transition reimbursements had expired and that Pruitt had not covered the bill.
The incident, aspects of which were first reported in the Hill newspaper, prompted Jackson to leave $600 in cash in Hupp’s drawer.
Millan Hupp's name may ring a bell. That's the longtime aide (she traveled with Pruitt to D.C. from Oklahoma) that Pruitt has reportedly been smearing in embarrassing phone calls to the decoder-ring club at the Federalist Society.
Hupp did everything but wipe Pruitt's ass (that we know of) and he's thrown her to the wolves because she would not lie under oath in front of Congress on his behalf.
Is Scott Pruitt a lizard?